This title provides an intriguing look at the development and benefits, as well as the psychological challenges, of the newest in reconstructive surgery - face transplants. In 2005, surgeons in France removed part of the face from a cadaver and grafted it onto the head of a 38-year-old woman who had been grossly disfigured. Although modern culture is accustomed to pushing medicine and the human body beyond all limits, the world's first partial face transplant caused a stir that still reverberates globally today. This book begins with the story of Isabelle Dinoire, the recipient of that first face transplant, her surgery and her battles with tissue rejection, but its scope widens with a look at how surgical teams are in a global race to perform the first full face transplant, and at how medical history has led up to this point - with prior successful transplants ranging from body parts as simple as cornea to those as neurologically complicated as the heart. The most novel among them - the face transplant - however, conjures up particular and expansive psychological issues. The authors show us how transplant recipients struggle with functional issues including a lifetime of anti-rejection drugs, but even more challenging in the case of a face transplant is the psychological effect on identity. Who are you, if suddenly your face - or a significant portion of it - is not what you were born with? What is it like to look in the mirror, and see a vision looking back that is not the face you have always had? The authors show us how, across history and media, humankind - via medicine, literature, film, and other media - has dreamed of a day when face transplants would be possible. Now with so many disfigurements occurring among the military in Iraq, and experimental face transplants too expensive for implementation in the private sector, it is likely that the U.S. military will take the reigns and further face transplant techniques quickly as possible to serve injured personnel. But what is the future of this ability and what are the psychological costs?